Investing in a world that is no longer predictable
By Ana Guzmán Quintana
What Twenty-Three Weeks of Reflection Have Taught Us
Now that summer is approaching and the weekly column is going on hiatus, it seemed like a good time for us to pause and look back. Since the beginning of January, each week we’ve chosen a topic that we felt deserved some more thoughtful reflection. These topics have been written by different people, from different perspectives and sensibilities, and perhaps, read individually, they might have seemed quite divergent.
And, in some ways, they have been. We’ve discussed Waterloo and Iran, Babylon and the Moon, fear in the markets and synodality, green bonds, artificial intelligence, effective altruism, and African private capital. There was no pre-established script intended to lead us to a specific conclusion. Furthermore, the topic is entirely open and is not revealed to the others beforehand. But when we now compile the twenty-three articles, a fairly clear common thread emerges: the difficulty of making sound decisions (and not just investment decisions) in an increasingly uncertain, faster-paced, and less cooperative world.
Ultimately, almost all the articles have approached the same question from different perspectives: what responsibility do we bear for what is happening, and what real capacity do we have to influence it? Because it is becoming increasingly difficult to talk about investment without also talking about the world we are financing. Geopolitics affects energy, inflation, and portfolios; technology modifies business models, professions, and power relations; and the origin of profit or how capital is used can no longer be left out of the analysis.
The first article of the year precisely addressed how to invest with impact when the world is no longer cooperative. Looking back, that question has ended up being a kind of unintentional framework for the entire semester. Perhaps the challenge isn’t simply adding a new list of risks to our models, but asking ourselves whether those models are still useful for understanding a much more political, fragmented, and competitive reality.
The semester began by recalling an old lesson. The story (or perhaps the myth) of the Rothschilds and Waterloo showed that markets have always reacted to a mixture of facts, rumors, fear, and informational advantage. The speed has changed radically, but human nature hasn’t. Today, we no longer wait days for a messenger to arrive: a news item, a statement, or an image travels the world in seconds. This speed doesn’t eliminate error; often, it amplifies it.
The war in Iran turned that historical reflection into an immediate issue. The temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the surge in oil prices, and the energy vulnerability of Europe and Asia returned geopolitics to the center of macroeconomic analysis. Inflation, growth, and monetary policy could no longer be interpreted solely based on traditional data. For weeks, a truce could lower the price of crude oil and restore optimism to risk assets; A new threat could reverse the trend. Even as de-escalation began to be considered, the conflict’s impact on interest rates and expectations remained.
The beginning of the year already signaled other areas of vulnerability: the divergence between the monetary policies of the United States, Europe, and Japan; political pressure on the independence of the Federal Reserve; US debt; the concentration of the S&P 500 in a small number of companies; and international relations in which security, sovereignty, and power carry increasing weight. Geopolitics is no longer a peripheral risk added to the analysis. It is the framework within which decisions are made regarding energy, water, food, semiconductors, data, and defense.
The Horn of Africa forced us to broaden our focus. The Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, the Suez Canal, the military bases in Djibouti, the Ethiopian Dam, and regional political fragility demonstrate the extent to which places rarely mentioned in everyday conversation can influence trade routes, energy, and power balances. Risk maps don’t necessarily coincide with media attention maps. And sometimes understanding what’s happening requires looking precisely where the headlines aren’t yet.
The consequence for investors is not trying to predict every geopolitical shift. It’s accepting that uncertainty is part of investing and preparing portfolios to live with it. The history of stock market corrections confirms this: markets spend more time rising than falling, and a significant portion of recoveries occurs when fear is still high. Selling to wait for things to become clearer often means returning to the market after a significant part of the rebound has already taken place. The true cost of panic isn’t always the fall itself, but rather missing out on the recovery. This doesn’t equate to advocating passivity. It means distinguishing between an emotional reaction and a portfolio decision. Planning, liquidity, diversification, and allocation consistent with risk tolerance are what allow investors to stay the course. In 2026, moreover, markets offered contradictory signals. While equities were supported by solid corporate earnings and growth expectations associated with artificial intelligence, sovereign debt warned of inflation, deficits, and prolonged high interest rates. Two markets were constructing two different narratives about the same future.
At some point, these two narratives will have to converge. If growth and productivity ultimately justify expectations, equities will have correctly interpreted the structural shift. If inflation and the cost of capital remain high, valuations will have to adjust. In the meantime, perhaps the wisest course of action is to understand the assumptions underlying each narrative and how much risk we are willing to take if they fail to materialize.
Artificial intelligence has played a central role during this period. At the beginning of the year, the declines of some major software companies demonstrated that AI not only creates winners but also challenges business models previously considered resilient. If tools capable of programming, automating processes, or adapting solutions reduce the value of certain tasks, the competitive advantage no longer lies simply in having digitized an activity. It lies in the ability to reinvent it.
At the same time, massive investment in AI infrastructure and development has sustained much of the stock market optimism. A significant tension emerges here: technology can boost productivity, margins, and growth, but the volume of capital committed also raises the bar for future returns. It’s not enough for AI to transform the economy; it must generate enough value to compensate all the capital it’s absorbing.
However, this reflection cannot be limited to the bottom line. Technology is not neutral because it incorporates priorities, distributes power, and can reproduce inequalities under a veneer of objectivity. Algorithms, data, and digital infrastructure are concentrated in private entities with capabilities exceeding those of many nation-states. Asking who decides, who is represented, who benefits, and who bears the consequences is as important as measuring the efficiency achieved.
The crisis of truth adds another dimension. Increasingly convincing synthetic texts, voices, and images can erode trust in what we see and hear, fuel polarization, and dilute accountability. A machine can simulate conversation or empathy, but not feel them; it can assist in a diagnosis, a class, or a decision, but not assume its moral responsibility. Transparency, traceability, data protection, and effective human oversight are not obstacles to innovation: they are the conditions for it to remain at the service of people. Hence the repeated emphasis in several articles on putting humanity before technology. Not because innovation should be stifled, but because it is important to remember what place it should occupy. Dignity, the common good, and social justice constitute a far more demanding framework than mere technical regulation. AI will be truly useful if it expands our capabilities without erasing responsibility, judgment, and compassion along the way.
The new space race takes this same question beyond Earth. Artemis, reusable rockets, lunar robots, and the possibility of harnessing resources on the Moon open up extraordinary opportunities for science, industry, and investment. Many technologies that are commonplace today were born from space-related challenges, and the next stage could accelerate advances in robotics, materials, energy, and artificial intelligence.
But humanity’s age-old ambition travels with us. Who gets to use space resources? How are their benefits distributed? What happens when technological capacity advances faster than the governance framework? The Moon is no longer just a scientific destination, but an economic and geopolitical platform. Simply arriving is no longer enough; the question is how to stay and under what rules.
On Earth, too, the transition is changing work. The rise of green talent demonstrates that sustainability no longer belongs to a single department. Engineers, lawyers, financial professionals, architects, technicians, and specialists from multiple fields need to incorporate environmental and social criteria into their work. The transformation is not just about creating new professions, but about modifying existing ones. Skills shortages can become one of the main obstacles to the transition, but also an opportunity to generate local employment, strengthen regions, and make companies more competitive.
Several of the semester’s reflections have directly addressed an uncomfortable issue: money may not smell, but its origin and destination matter. The expression «pecunia non olet» describes how easily profit becomes morally detached from the activity that generates it. Value chains and financial intermediation make it possible for an investor to end up financing controversial activities without even realizing it. The greater the distance, the easier it is to feign neutrality.
But every investment strengthens certain economic models over others. This doesn’t compel us to pursue an impossible moral purity, nor does it eliminate gray areas. It does, however, compel us to ask better questions. Not just how much an activity yields, but how it achieves that yield, what risks it transfers to others, and what consequences it produces. Standardized labels are helpful, but they never replace judgment.
Reflection on the irreparable took this responsibility to its extreme. There are damages that money cannot compensate for and power structures that cannot be transformed through a subsequent donation. Philanthropy cannot function as a mechanism to buy a conscience or rehabilitate a reputation. When the origin of wealth is linked to harm, returning a portion does not replace justice, accountability, or the reform of the institutions that made it possible.
The reflection on effective altruism introduced the other side of the issue: good intentions alone are not enough. If resources are limited, it’s important to analyze where they can generate the most well-being, compare interventions, and measure their results. Making generosity a stable, evidence-based habit is a valuable contribution. But effectiveness shouldn’t reduce human reality to a cold classification, nor should it allow the end to overshadow the quality of the means. Ultimately, we must ask where the capital comes from, but also what it’s truly for and how it’s used.
Green bonds offer a concrete example of how to channel resources toward a necessary transition. After years of growth, the market can experience periods of slower activity without losing its purpose. Financing renewable energy, efficiency, sustainable infrastructure, climate adaptation, and resilience will remain essential, particularly as electricity demand linked to digitalization and AI increases. The quality of the instrument will depend on project selection, the traceability of funds, and evidence of impact, not just the label attached to the bond. Sustainable investment also doesn’t offer a guarantee of security. What it offers, if done well, is a more comprehensive way of understanding risk. Climate change can no longer be treated as an ideological preference or a letter in an acronym: it affects prices, migration, supply chains, and financial stability. And the transition will only be viable if it is socially acceptable—that is, if energy, housing, mobility, health, and education remain accessible. It doesn’t eliminate uncertainty (nothing does), but it helps us avoid getting caught up in immediate reactions.
The quality of an investment also depends on the decision-making process. Synodality, walking together, provides a useful perspective even outside the Church. Listening, participation, transparency, accountability, and evaluation don’t dilute authority: they make it more conscious and defensible. Managing wealth isn’t simply buying products or delegating to an entity; it’s setting objectives, selecting professionals, distributing responsibilities, and monitoring results.
This governance is especially important when the portfolio must express a mission. Good intentions do not replace procedures, just as technical expertise does not replace institutional discernment. Incorporating diverse voices and external knowledge can improve a decision, provided that roles and ultimate responsibility are clear. In this sense, investment can become an extension of the mission of a family, a foundation, or a congregation, but only if there is coherence between values, process, and portfolio.
In a less cooperative world, impact investing needs to better define the role of private capital. The withdrawal of international aid and the weakening of some multilateral mechanisms leave gaps that capital can help fill. But let’s not be mistaken: it cannot replace the state or single-handedly fix structural problems. It can catalyze, innovate, and help scale solutions. That is why it is so important to mobilize more capital as well as to design it better and distinguish between the concessional resource that unlocks a solution and the one that ends up numbing the market or perpetuating dependent models.
Proximity is also regaining importance. In contrast to grand global narratives, many effective solutions arise from concrete needs, local knowledge, and truly affordable services. A local solution can be replicated without losing its connection to the people it aims to serve. And here emerges an idea that may be uncomfortable, but which we believe is important: impact investing also requires a certain ethic of forgoing. Not everything needs to be funded, not everything needs to grow, and deciding where we don’t want to be can be just as relevant as choosing where we do.
Africa offers one of the clearest examples of this consistency. The continent receives less than 1% of global institutional capital, despite its demographics, resources, and entrepreneurial potential. However, describing the problem solely as a lack of money leads to incomplete answers. There are trillions of dollars in local assets, emerging managers with promising results, and markets that barely register on the international radar. What is often lacking are instruments, guarantees, liquidity, and financial infrastructure capable of connecting that capital with opportunities. The InfraCredit example in Nigeria illustrates the power of building the right bridge: a local currency guarantee enabled infrastructure bonds to achieve pension-compatible ratings and unlocked capital already within the country. A grandiose solution wasn’t needed from the outside. What was needed was understanding the specific constraint and working with the local ecosystem.
Taking Africa seriously means revising criteria that systematically exclude first-generation managers for lacking the experience they could only acquire with capital. It means supporting market infrastructure, co-investing with local players, and accepting that leadership doesn’t necessarily have to come from traditional financial centers. Purpose-driven capital begins with the humility to recognize that proximity provides knowledge that no remote model can replace.
Babylon symbolically closes this journey. The historical city and the imagined city are not exactly the same. Archaeology, the Bible, Orientalism, film, opera, and theater have all layered interpretations, transforming it into a mirror reflecting the concerns of each era. Looking at Babylon forces us to separate evidence from narrative, reality from projection.
The present demands the same. Markets construct narratives about inflation, growth, and technology; investors construct narratives about countries, sectors, and managers; societies construct narratives about progress and power. These narratives are necessary to guide us, but they become dangerous when we forget that they are interpretations.
Rereading the twenty-three reflections, we don’t find a single formula, and perhaps that’s for the best. We do find some recurring convictions: don’t react out of fear, look beyond the headlines, don’t confuse innovation with progress, demand consistency between profitability and how it’s achieved, and measure impact without reducing people to mere data points.
In the short term, we’ll continue talking about interest rates, oil, corporate earnings, and volatility. In the long term, there’s the energy transition, artificial intelligence, the future of work, the distribution of power, and the quality of institutions. A good portfolio must understand both horizons. But, after everything written over these past months, perhaps we’re left with something even simpler: capital doesn’t just try to predict the future. Like it or not, it also helps to build it.